One April 17, the Herald reported Gov. Jared Polis’ lament for a new prison. He is wrong. What we need is competent management.
Over the past two decades, we’ve been through around a dozen executive directors who took us from a state with 20 overcrowded prisons to 30 we can’t fill. As quickly as we built these prisons at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, we closed six of the 10 we built, plus six older facilities, leaving us with 18 and overcrowding again. Over the past 30 years, our prison population has consistently hovered around 20,000 inmates. Bad management.
The bigger problem pervasive in Colorado and the U.S. at large is over-incarceration. We have more people imprisoned than any other nation on the planet. Are Americans actually the most evil people on Earth? No. We’ve turned prisons into a subsidy. Prisons provide jobs for Americans, and it is as senseless as the subsidized corn we grow.
Most of the past 22 years I’ve spent in prison has been in minimum custody facilities. No fence around me. I have a key to my cell. Little supervision. I work outside prison grounds fighting fires, on disaster relief jobs or on the ranch at Canon City, where I drive a welding truck and go from job to job throughout the day. I am not unique. About half the population is similarly situated. But it costs more than $50,000 per year to keep me and 10,000 others like me locked up. Bad management.
John David Cochran, La Plata County Jail
Durango